[Oberon] Re: Component Pascal StdCoder.Decode ?

[Chris Glur]

> > It's all the different format's/encodings of plain text that annoys me.
> 
> Treutwein Bernhard wrote:
> BlackBox uses ist own document format, which is similar but not
> same as the Oberon Text format.

Maybe someone will make a translator to ascii, eg. for S3 ?
Or is the BlackBox format copyright ?

> > [...] But everything: C, cp, S3, V4; must all be reduceable to
> > plain-text source.
> 
> sure they are, but they loose readability.

OK, there is nothing more important than 'readability', even if
it's somewhat subjective and difficult to describe. It's my final
excuse for still using S3, when the whole world seems to disagree.

Doug Danforth wrote:-
> For what it is worth, I have saved the .mod files for C2cp as .txt
> and wrapped them in a zip file for you.

Thanks. It's more substantial than I was expecting; but I'll start
analysing it soon.

Les May wrote:
> I think that there is a file on a CP/Oberon related web site which Wirth 
> wrote as an example of when not reusing old code and starting from 
> scratch with a new approach is beneficial. This dealt with compressing 
> text files into a coding which used a smaller number of bits than ASCII 
> to encode the characters. This may be what you are looking for. Sorry if 
> I am a bit vague about this. I seem to remember printing it out some 
> time ago, so looking on an ETH related website for Wirth's writings 
> might be a good place to start.

That's just one reason why 'computer' is NOT spelled "WINTEL"
for me.  But some things are fairly permanent:
* we've got ten fingers - hence decimal system;
* the latin-char-set is well established, which implies about 
(2*26 + some)chars <  2^ n chars.  So you need 8 bits.
And that handles Cyrillic too.

== Chris Glur.